les actu, les insolites, la vu sur notre monde

August 2017

03/04/2013

'Lynch started off as an artist, and when you remember this, his films make much more sense – if that is the word. One of the things you notice, secondarily, about Eraserhead is how little dialogue there is in it.'

'The point is that Lynch prefers the image to the word. His favourite directors, he has said, are Tati, Herzog and Kubrick, all of whom can be said to use silences of varying lengths to great effect. (Although the relentless background noise of his films, continuous in Eraserhead, sporadic in, say, Blue Velvet, most notably as a precursor to sexual violence, shows how interested he is in different kinds of silence: the "room tone", which film-makers have to be very careful to match when shooting the same scene from different angles.) He is also a great fan of Francis Bacon, which comes as no surprise when you look at the mutant baby in Eraserhead, which recalls nothing so much as the painter's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.'